THE TOPSHLOE
Two friends seeking eternal life receive it, but awake in a future of nightmares where all remnants of life as they knew it have been destroyed.
INTRODUCTION (NOTES)-
When I wrote this at the beginning of 2018, it was intended as a parody of the excesses of contemporary progressivism by taking a lot of the troubling, illiberal rhetoric and aggressive tendencies of the time to its logical extremes. As much as I was disturbed by a lot of the venomous authoritarianism of the right, the left were becoming of increasing concern to me too.
I imagined a totalitarian dystopia where those who claim to preach tolerance, yet so lacking in self awareness of their own lack of tolerance established a terrifying politically correct surveillance state.
The plot itself is a parody of Selina Hasting’s book “The Man who Wanted to Live Forever”. The characters in this story were created for a project whilst I was studying creative writing at college in 2015. “The Topshloe” is simply the final chapter of the entire story of “The Harvestman” which focuses more on the characters’ reunion and their quest.
In this story our protagonists, a mismatched pair of reunited childhood friends, Tokotomi, a shallow, flamboyant courtier of the King, and Bunge, a frugal, utilitarian country farmer trek up a mountain to receive eternal life from a wizard called the Harvestman. After being haunted by the ghost of Tokotomi’s father and deciding they don’t want that to become their fate.
When they leave the wizard’s lair they step out into a bleak, brutalist urban landscape of enforced ideological uniformity, where everyone walks on eggshells for fear of saying or even thinking the wrong thing for fear of punishment, which is a very easy fate to befall because the laws of logic have been warped to allow for maximum inclusivity.
We encounter a toxic atmosphere of chronic vitriol and rage. A Hogarthian hellscape of terminal societal decay. A world in which all people are constantly consumed in an explosive comic book fight cloud of screaming grey Guernica faces.
At the time I thought it was funny, but as I look back on it it’s truly alarming to see how much of the most exaggerated and extreme possible scenarios of this satire have become indistinguishable from society today.
I never predicted that little over two years after I wrote this that the society I had imagined and feared would come into being, and, if anything was even more deranged, dark, farcical and horrific than anything I could have predicted.
THE TOPSHLOE
“My werkles here is done. You have eternital life yu knoe.”
Harvestman grinned with millipedes between the teeth. They approached a dripping pink sphinxter.
“This will exit us from the mountain.”
“FANKYU HARVEYSTMAN” they said. They slid hard down the mountain’s intestine, elxerted the mountains craggy anus in green slime.
But Moakelern they could see it now. It had grown massive and the whole valley destroyen by oppressive grey slabs eroded all sense of municipal pride. Architectural blight and environment= bye bye! What had been and done by this spells???
“Time shifts in a way when you leave my snow-dusted peak.” Harvestman grinned. It was the future world. Everything from their time was gone. Everything was scary and different and wrong.
Tokotomi frightened and scared and even Bunge was dunged.
“Bunge me back to how we was yoo florbo!”
“NO!”
They had dunxed this on themselves the thoughtless bungeing bastards.
Felxa is a neurodiverse wolverinekin non-non-non-binerry schizophroonic anamorexic mega-oppressed intersectional feminist out to smash the pastryarchy.
Fuck femanast oppressed privileged death to cis lesbians and privileged end of metaphor death. Gay men are so misogynist male privileged and evil idiots. They’re not attracted to women, which is discriminatory and sexist.
Death to white men I DON’T WANT TO WARE PANTSE! I wonkid freedims to be a dog it is my troe speeshys. Daddy I am coming out as Trans-canine. If you question me I shall have you arrestedated for bigotry and sent for re-education.
I DONNNMOT WONKID A JENDER BINERRY!!!!!
Bigoted Halloween children appropriation will be shot on sight. Fat feminist fry up oo florbo the feminous helmet sprayed with pussy paint. Racist supremacists hate agender dementia ken and the shelter hoe dies with expressed a desire to execute all men. DEATH TO MEN! Womern win because we are victums.
NO WHITES- We’re progressive.
Divine vagina queen DESTROY PENIS on the magic hat of Queen Celery. Celery is female nonpale tetrigender demiqueer elected fair and equilaterally quadrilateral, becuz sheese lest privilogjed than the #whitemales her votes are worth dubble de trubble.
Celery’s magic hat has a broadcast barb that she can use to access all thoughts of the citizens. This allows us to tackle hate crime at its root and prevents sexism, ableism, fattism, fascism, mega-fascism, sexism, racism, sexism, appropriation, transgendermaphobia, transmisogny, sexism and sexism. Before it can be verbalised, causing the evil crime of offence, the hateful thought is detected by the magic hat and the traitor’s mouth permanently sealed shut at the push of a button.
Yu think me leuk sexy? SEXIST MIGODSYNISY RAPE RAPE RAPEY MAN! You and your entire gender are born with original sin and you must pya. Yu must only fuk fat chix because patriarchy. Ban anyone who criticise hooray now their opinions are gone forever!
Because you can’t do this. Can’t say that. Can’t attend a party in a racist hat. Stick to your own culture you colonialist racist white het race hat pondscum. No COSNERVATIVES CUM IN HERE. They are dangeroo fascists and hate democracy so they must be banned and subject to extrajudicial torture. The exception to this are of course fundamentalist terrorists, who we cannot ever dare subject to our disapproval, because that would be racist. We will never criticise your glorious feminist religion because we agree that people who disagrees with us must be punished.
Queen Celery destroyed her presidential rival and his stupid racist supporters to show how progressive she is. DO NOT ASSUME ME PRONOWNS YOU FGUCKING TRANSGENDERMAFOBBIC MEGAHITLER!!!!!!
In Celeria’s utopia, all food is 3-dimensionally printed flavour neutral vegan rubber because consumption of plants is a botanical hate crime and appropriates the LGBGBTQIAPFFSTGBDDDQRSSTPOVNDVQBWZGUXYCTTVH7098EQQQQQQQQQQQTX3√29892 communitae.
The previous president his behind a screen to avoid visual harassment becauser xe understood that rapists are fucking everywhere and they are called all men!!! The permanent safe space protected xis feewings. Wen wickle pwesidink herd a wacism, xe cwied wike a wickle baby and pwayed wib xis cwayons to carm awae de hurt of de patwiarchal wape culcher.
In the end, xe was accused of neglect of non-white issues. When xe addressed non-white issues and burnt the whole city to the ground to erase all traces of colonialism, xe was deposed and executed for appropriating non-white oppression and whitesplaining.
NON WHITE? BLACK? THOSE WOERDS AER RACISS YU MUS BE BANND U DFGUCKING NAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Celery is a megalomaniac and an entitled hypocrite but it’s progressive because she challenges the oppressive patriarchal structure. Now Celery is pronounsed- 3e/3ei. Switcheroo! Castle Queen Side! Suddenly everything changes and you must move. One wrong step= death.
In the vagitopal Moaky (changed from its colonial name of Moakelern) gender neutral panracial transpersonoids wear smart glucose and webnet hyperhelmets, intersectionalist noncolourspecific hand sheaths with technoimprint and anti-rape capes. To avoid harassment, each of the 700 different genders live segregated and never interact. Everyone can live safely apart from each other in their own privilege safe spaces constructed by the Safe Space Stasi.
Everyone’s life’s worth is determined by the coloured triangles that they wear that denotes their privilege status. In my safe space I can has crayons and play dow and plushies and squishes and fidget spinners and pipe cleaners and pom poms and cookies and paint by numbers and bubbles and fuzzy felts and soft toys and blankets and kittens and no no no no no no horrible scary people that assume my pronowns.
Everyone receives a personalised AI sexfriend, but this privilege is denied to those who already have enough privilege like white men, although white men who identify as black women can receive their sexfriend.
Bunge and Tokotomi was all in a tizz.
“The future is fowl.” He said.
“NOOOO!” sneered a genderqueer owl. “THE FUTURE IS FEMALOID AND PURE.”
“SEXIST! SEXIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSTTT!!!!”
“You evil white men!”
“HOW DARE YOU ASSUME THEIR COLOUR YOU RACIST!!!!!!? They could have racial dysphoria and be born again Africans. How dare you assume they are men! They could be menstruators how do you knoe?”
“What???? You transgendermaphobe! How dare you assume that men can’t be menstruators alsoe! You must face 100,000 lashes for your hate crimes.”
The harvestman laughed a horsey laugh.
“Holy mother of fuck what have we done?”
Bunge did not dunge at all in the future. Tokotomi’s clothes were all out fashion, from an era of colonial white male cisgendered heteronormative oppression. Tokotomi’s friends all dead. King Henrik dead. A museum poster advertised his mummified remains: ‘See the disgusting imperialist manocratic scourge of the colonial maleocracy: King Henrik XVIII’s mummy. Watch us burn his rapist corpse! Tickets free to all non-men.’
“What? How dare you insult King Henrik. King Henrik could’ve been an evil cisgendered white supremacist piece of shit, but he could also have been a black non binary fairy Queen. No one asked them!!! Also he is dead, which is the ultimate marginalised identity.”
“All men must DIEEEEEEE!!!!” screamed a feminist hippopotamus woman wearing a prosthetic purple beard. “They are subordinate to femalids.”
“But can’t they be equal?” asked Tokotomi
“SHOVE IT UP YOUR RHUBARB NOB TUBE YOU CIS-HETERO-GENIC SEXIST RACIST FASCIST C*NT! YOU WILL ENCUCUMBERATE A FACE WORSER THAN DETH!!!!”
“What?!?! How dare you assume they/them has a rhubarb nob tube! He could have a gentleman’s vagina, you are a bigot for assuming!”
The feminist hippopotamus woman then committed immediate ritual suicide because she had bringed dishonour.
Mangy gobloids snarl and gnash and scream. Green skinned toothless bin piglets in ratty rainbow wigs and sticky velcro harnesses shriek and slam each other’s faces with discarded mirrors. Old men dressed as pink rabbits defecate in the street.
They were two normal men now considered far right and trapped in a far wrong future.
“King Henrik would’ve given you back you silkies and your homo treats if you’d waited and not got in a stroppy.” Said the Harvestman. Tears rollod down the faces as the place they had once called home had descended into a stinky, polluted squirch-hole of miserable, grey, smelly totalitarian puritanism.
“If you can’t take us back: make it bungeing end!” pleaded Bunge.
“As you wish.”
He was gone. A massively tall inky black cloaked shadow stood in the frozen time.
“Many years has done and passed but living forever when you aren’t engaged in your surroundings, the perception of time quickens to the point that centuries may pass.”
Tokotomi and Bunge snuggled together in fears.
“I am death. I am come for you. This city is built on all the shoes that I wore out trying to run you down. But I have caught you up and now you have given yourselves to me.”
Death lifted his skirt revealing his boots.
“That’s my boots!” shrieked Tokotomi.
“That’s them!” shrieked Death.
The blazing heat of the burning of King Henrik’s corpse and his colonial legacy unfroze time. Death’s hood cap back and snapped into action sucking souls and that, deeper into the empty black vacuum the dense black absolute nothing of the lonely universe burst into birdsong and Bunge and Tokotomi floating away to a new dimension, Death’s pelvis smells like easter eggs.
THE END.
*SOME NOTES ON THE ARTWORK & STYLE OF THE TEXT
It is a digital collage of my own photos and cartoons. Some of the screaming faces were AI generated in craiyon and then distorted in the editing software before being collaged into the rest of the image. The backdrop is made up of Plymouth, a place that should be a charming harbourside coastal city but instead looks more like Moldova. Then you have the trash filled back alley in the arse end of the seedy kebab district of Bournemouth, where I once lived in an Isengard apartment tower. The dark lord’s tower is literally just some godawful hideous skyscraper in Birmingham and the sea in the background is Dawlish, one of Devon’s finest suicide, I mean seaside locations.
The whole text is deliberately written in a very crude, technically bad style to reflect how people talk when arguing online, (i.e. frequent spelling errors, aggressive use of caps lock, incoherent sentences hammered out unthinkingly in the rage of the moment as the fist mashes the keyboard in a fit of uncontrollable primordial anger.)
In terms of content, much of what was said is based on genuine comments that were actually posted online, so in some respects, this isn’t even a caricature of 21st century authoritarian progressivism so much as it is a mirror, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised at the rapid descent of it being simply frustrating to being outright dystopian.